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Thanksgiving ’84 storm: a powerful, unnamed 2-day drubbing

It was a Thanksgiving that turned out to be a real turkey, weather-wise. The force of the 1984 storm took forecasters by surprise – and catapulted Palm Beacher Mollie Wilmot into the national headlines.

The system muscled up off the South Florida coast exactly 25 years ago, dumping torrents of rain in Palm Beach County on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 22, and continuing into the post-holiday shopping day.

Winds gusted in off the water with gale force and delivered an unwelcome visitor to the Wilmot beach: the rusty Venezuelan freighter, the Mercedes.

She discovered the wreck the morning after the holiday. A maid woke her up in her home at 1075 N. Ocean Blvd., next to what was then the Kennedy compound, to tell her some unexpected guests had arrived.

“I thought it was the man who was coming to photograph my home for Town & Country,” she famously told The New York Times.

But when she stepped outside to look, she found the rotting carcass of the ship that had run aground next to her poolside cabana.

Thus began the media madness that washed over Palm Beach for the next 105 days as salvagers tried to figure out what to do with the Mercedes. A big part of the story was Mollie herself – she showed style and class by feeding the rough-cut 12-man freighter crew finger sandwiches, caviar, cookies and coffee in her cabana.

The writers and TV newscasters who came calling were offered martinis.

Newspapers called it a tropical storm but it was an unnamed, unclassified two-day drubbing that warranted a 51-page analysis by the South Florida Water Management District.

“The total duration of the storm (48-plus hours) caused an accumulative effect of storm surge and runoff that exceeded that of many hurricanes and tropical storms, which typically pass in about 12 hours,” noted the report, published a month later.

More than 19 inches of rain drenched the area west of Jupiter, and 14 inches fell between Jupiter and West Palm Beach. There were power failures from high winds, and a man was electrocuted when he stepped on a downed power line in Juno Beach.

Parts of Dreher Park in West Palm Beach were under water. In Palm Beach, Seaspray Avenue was awash in water waist deep.

Here’s what happened: A cold front swept through Palm Beach County on Nov. 20, dropping just over a half-inch of rain – nothing out of the ordinary. But when the front reached the Keys, it stalled out.

Low pressure developed and it began shifting north on the 21st. By Thanksgiving Day it was just off the coast of the Palm Beach County-Broward County line. That’s where it stopped, and began to intensify.

A high pressure system off the Mid-Atlantic coast prevented the low from moving further north, and helped generate high winds. The area of the heaviest rains were just north of the low – Palm Beach northward to Martin County.

“Rainfall amounts of 12 inches were common in this region,” SFWMD officials said.

The most intense downpour of the storm occurred in West Palm Beach on Nov. 22 – in the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning – when almost 2 inches of rain fell in just one hour, from 1 to 2 a.m.

Check out the SFWMD report for more details on the storm than you’d ever want to know, including a series of maps and charts.

As for the Mercedes, the state hired Donjon Marine Co. of New Jersey to haul it away, but it wasn’t that simple. Idea after idea failed, and at one point a psychic was brought in to help dislodge the ship. She wouldn’t budge.

A local songwriter wrote a tune to the lyrics of Big John, called Donjon.

It went: “Well, nobody really knew how to move that barge. They pulled it and they pushed it but it was just too large.”

But Mollie Wilmot finally did get her beach back on March 6, 1985, after a successful effort by the salvage crew. The Mercedes was purchased for $29,450 by Broward County, which sank it as an artificial reef a mile off Fort Lauderdale.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office Bomb and Arson Unit loaded it up with 360 pounds of TNT, and it went down quickly – with Mollie watching from 800 feet overhead in a Goodyear blimp, according to the 1992 book, Thirty Florida Shipwrecks,, by Kevin McCarthy.

“I’ll have to learn to live without it,” Mollie, who died in 2002, said at a final press conference the day the freighter was pulled free. “But I’ll do it and do it happily. I felt the big moment was really last night. We had a slight party last night, and we might continue it tonight.”